a not unperfect goodbye

A friend of mine sent this to his former boss who tried friending him on facebook. Capturing the well-worded and reasonable vitriol for posterity. Names have been redacted to prevent my friend becoming known as 'that facebook guy' which he would likely hate:

[Redacted],

I find it to be the culture of corporate America that failure and incompetence are not acknowledged. Often they are glossed over in false platitudes and then are later ignored out a since of keeping a veneer of social pleasantry. Honestly, I would have been very happy never to encounter you again in any form, but as you have attempted to enlist my facebook “friendship” I thought I would take the opportunity to be pretty clear on the utter and complete contempt I have for you as both co-worker and a human being.

I have had the opportunity to work with many talented and driven firms in my career and have never seen arrogant failure on the scope you visited upon [redacted]. You are so utterly self-involved and obsessed that you refused to acknowledge that you knew nothing of the content and entertainment business. Rather than try and learn the business, to take a business a lot of people had worked very hard to bring to profitability, you loaded the deck with ineffectual, overpaid sycophants that knew even less than you about the tasks at hand than you did and lacked any drive or work ethic. You had taken a 10 year-old business that overcame huge adversity and was finding it’s way and single-handedly killed it within a year. If this was your goal, then you are to be congratulated in the single-minded push which you pursued this goal. If not, I would invite you to revisit the last year and consider the outcome.

This would only earn you the status of being considered incompetent. The contempt I hold for you comes from having to suffer through working under you for six months until I elected to leave. You are a liar, you treat people poorly (this being an understatement) and you have become so enamored of a vision of yourself as a Steve Jobs-type character that I personally witnessed you discard good business decisions because that did not spring from you: The Great and Mighty OZ. You trashed relationships that it took many of us years to build and left [redacted] with a toxic reputation in your wake. You removed professionals that understood the business and had built everything you were just handed and in some cases removed them to replace with your own children, being allowed to do this earned the management at [redacted] similar ire. I also believe you to be guilty of purposeful age discrimination. This based on your pattern of lay-offs, the people hired to fill those roles (an aside: the point of downsizing is to reduce staff and overhead – I am not sure you understand that concept, but thought I would clue you into it as I am wasting enough of my time responding to you), and statements I witnessed you make in the course of having to work with you.

I am writing this to let you know: I don’t want to be your friend on Facebook. I don’t want to be on your self-aggrandizing email newsletter. I am sure given your massive ego you will feel compelled to respond, just know I have no intent of reading your response or any other attempts at contact. I want you to go away.

-[Redacted]

Comments

[Matt Payton]

I need a cigarette after reading that. Wow!